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We're dying on another day
My poem "The Trouble Over" is now online at Uncanny Magazine.
I wrote it last Armistice Day; it's a ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg. He is one of my very favorite poets of the First World War, even though like almost everyone else I discovered him well after Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or even David Jones. Most of the things about him that are important to me are in the poem, but I recommend Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008) and Vivian Noakes' 21st-Century Oxford Authors: Isaac Rosenberg (2008) if you are curious about more. The title comes from a letter he wrote to Edward Marsh in December 1915: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Given the generally shoddy state of Rosenberg's health even before the war, I have also always had a certain amount of sympathy for the sentiment expressed in another letter to Marsh, this one from February 1917: "This winter is a teaser for me; and being so long without a proper rest I feel as if I need one to recuperate and be put to rights again. However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph."
I wrote it last Armistice Day; it's a ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg. He is one of my very favorite poets of the First World War, even though like almost everyone else I discovered him well after Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or even David Jones. Most of the things about him that are important to me are in the poem, but I recommend Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008) and Vivian Noakes' 21st-Century Oxford Authors: Isaac Rosenberg (2008) if you are curious about more. The title comes from a letter he wrote to Edward Marsh in December 1915: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Given the generally shoddy state of Rosenberg's health even before the war, I have also always had a certain amount of sympathy for the sentiment expressed in another letter to Marsh, this one from February 1917: "This winter is a teaser for me; and being so long without a proper rest I feel as if I need one to recuperate and be put to rights again. However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph."
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Thank you!
I think being in community with the dead as well as the living may be important to me.